High capacity thermoelectric cooler unit

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"Management of the temperature of electronic systems is becoming increasingly important as society becomes more and more dependent on the communications and transport infrastructure they support. Often outages caused by ""signalling problems"" on the railways or ""service unavailable"" in mobile phone systems and home broadband can be traced to overheating (or freezing) in the enclosures where the electronics is housed. More generally, operation at a reduced temperature ultimately improves the long-term reliability of the electronic systems.This project aims to exploit recent performance improvements in thermoelectric semiconductor materials used as heat pumps to bring to the market high capacity cooler units for use with such electronic enclosures. To do this we need to take the basic thermoelectric modules and engineer a system around them that is cost effective and performant. The project will develop the key technology areas to enable this: the heat exchanger unit and the electronics & control algorithm which will drive the heat pump in such a way as to maximise its performance at the system level. Thermoelectric heat pumps are unique in that they can pump heat in either direction and thus the same device can be used for heating or cooling purposes without any hardware or software changes.As the disruption to society caused by IT & electronic systems failure become more widespread and less acceptable, manufacturers of such systems are starting to address reliability issues and assure product performance under extremes of weather conditions. By having a suitable temperature regulation product available we will be able meet the growing market demand for such a device. The same unit can also serve as a dehumidification unit or as an conventional air conditioner.In the longer term we anticipate the technology will benefit from economy of scale and the cost of the chiller unit will bring it to within range of the domestic cooling market (fridges, air-conn, etc). This will enable us to displace the vapour compression / expansion systems currently in use with a refrigerant-free system (with attendant environmental benefits). Thermoelectrics have an incredibly long lifetime - many decades - and this coupled with low running costs will generate significant market pull for such cooling products."